A knitting retreat gets knotty in this humorous and poignant novel about love, second chances, and the unyielding bonds between mothers and daughters.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Jamie Brenner’s The Weekend Crashers, which releases on November 4th 2025.
Maggie Hodges and her daughter Piper are looking forward to a restful knitting retreat in the picturesque village of New Hope, Pennsylvania. But instead, they are surprised to find themselves sharing their charming riverside inn with a rowdy bushcraft bachelor party. Undaunted by the clash of interests and personalities, Maggie suggests a lighthearted competition—a battle of crafts—that sparks a rivalry between the two groups, and perhaps something more. But as the weekend unfolds, old mistakes and buried resentments begin to surface, threatening to destroy Maggie and Piper’s cherished connection.
In knitting, one can easily fix mistakes by picking apart each stitch and starting anew. But life’s tangles aren’t so easily mended. With tensions rising and the retreat coming to a close, Maggie must act quickly before she loses everything she holds dear. Can she repair what’s been broken before everything unravels?
Prologue
The New Hope Inn is one of those old buildings that still has hidden doorways dating back to the days of Prohibition. It’s rumored the place helped shelter soldiers during the Revolutionary War. A lot of other his-torical things probably happened there. Belinda, the current innkeeper, simply knows that for the past twenty-five years, her knitting retreats have made it a tourist destination.
Belinda Yarrow and her husband, Max, own the inn together. But retreat weekends are her domain. She blocks out rooms for her knitters and manages every last detail to create a cozy cocoon for her special guests. To make it feel like their place. And her husband should know this by now. So why is he hanging a banner over the inn’s entrance that reads “Welcome Bushcraft Bachelor Party”? She marches over to him, crunching through a pile of orange and gold leaves.
“What are you doing?” she calls out. “It’s my knitting retreat weekend.”
She can tell by the sheepish look on his face that he forgot. And then when he recovers, once he’s processed that he messed up, he says, “There’s room for both.”
He doesn’t understand, even after she’s explained it countless times.
“It’s not about the space, it’s about the atmosphere,” she says. Belinda likes to cultivate a certain vibe. But talking “vibes” to Max is like talking to a wall.
“I’m sorry, Belinda. But I don’t think your knitters will care one whit. It’s going to be fine,” he says.
“I don’t want this weekend to be ‘fine,’ ” she says. “I need it to be perfect. This weekend of all weekends.” Maybe that, at the very least, he can understand: This weekend matters.
Excerpted from The Weekend Crashers by Jamie Brenner © 2025 by Jamie Brenner, used with permission by Park Row Books/HarperCollins.
